Ian David Abrahams (born 15 January 1958) is an English mathematician and held the Beyer Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, 2008–2016.
[2] He completed his BSc in aeronautical engineering in 1979 and PhD (and DIC) in applied mathematics in 1982, both at Imperial College London.
For his PhD he was supervised by Frank Leppington for a thesis entitled The scattering of sound by finite thin elastic plates and cavities.
Motivated by the problems of austenitic steel welds, they went on to develop a theory for wave propagation in certain inhomogeneous anisotropic solids.
This has led to developments, for example in relating Wiener-Hopf factorisation to Spitzer's identity and other important results within probability theory.